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BIG GIRLS/LITTLE BOYS

The further adventures of Gov. Mark and Jilted Jenny (along with a woman named Maria, a spiritual adviser, the people of South Carolina and a bunch of snakebit Republicans who wish the God they claim to believe in could raise Strom Thurmond from the dead even if he was a babydaddy for all those years -- because he was decent enough to keep it mostly a secret until he was dead).

What
kind of guy asks his wife for permission to go see his mistress (and I bet he had tears in his eyes and said please)? That would be Gov. Mark.

What
kind of wife says "No mistress," then claims she believed it when told
her he was going hiking in the mountains and was surprised when he WENT TO SEE THE MISTRESS anyway? That would be Jilted Jenny, who is allegedly smarter than that. Repeat after me: A guy who has been following
his penis around for several years and calling it love is not interested going on a hike.

Of course, one time she did say yes when Gov. Mark pleaded with her to let him end his affair face to face. She sent him away to New York with a "trusted spiritual adviser" as a chaperone (praise Jesus). The Gov., his Argentinian love and the chaperone went to dinner, went to church and went their separate ways (at least that is how the story goes). But it wasn't really over.

Now news stories claim South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford and his wife Jilted Jenny are trying to work things out, but I figure it's pretty hard
to go slouching home to Mama with your pants around your ankles and an
Argentinian woman dangling from your penis like the last bright and
lonely ornament on last year's drooping Christmas tree.

Meanwhile, Gov. Mark says in another interview he believes he can fall back in love with Jilted Jenny, but I wouldn't count on it. This is what the apparently grammatically challenged (watch those verb tenses, big guy) governor said of what he realized as he set out for Argentina: "I will be able to die knowing that I had met my soul mate."

Let's settle back and see what happens next now.

(Don't you just love it when Republican Christian loudmouths get caught with their pants down?)

Today's New York Times has an obituary for Bettie Page. The headline reads: "Bettie Page, Queen of the Pinups, Dies at 85." The Times is selling Bettie short. She was not a pinup queen. Well, she was. But she quit being a pinup queen years ago. Generations of men and boys worshipped Bettie Page, dropping to their knees in front of her photograph for decades. There are naked Betties, partially clothed Betties, whips and bondage Betties, Bettie spanking and being spanked, and for some reason Bettie with a short whip and a stuffed toy monkey, always with the bangs and the black hair. There are men and boys who would have paid good money to be Bettie's monkey. She understood the impact her highest-and-even-higher-heeled shoes had on the male imagination. They were shoes no ordinary woman would wear (Bettie knew how to make a point). Who could even walk in them? Bettie's shoes weren't made for walking; they were fuck-me shoes. She understood other things too. She was the woman men and boys had sex with while they were waiting for their good girl to come along. No doubt Bettie was a homewrecker. What other woman could ever measure up to Bettie Page? It was a time when no good girl wanted to (or admitted she wanted to) be like Bettie and I am sure there are women who found themselves home alone because they were not Bettie Page. Bettie understood things. You could see it in her eyes. If you looked at her eyes. And there was an innocence in Bettie that is easier and easier to see in an age when most everyone's child has seen real porn on the Internet by they time they are 11 years old and are bored with it a couple of years later. Porn is boring. Bettie Page never looked boring. I was 13 years old (about the age kids get porn-bored these days) when I found Bettie in 1957. That was the same year Bettie left the pinup business and disappeared into the world of mystery and photographs. She was 34 years old and had been a Playboy centerfold only a couple of years before that. Boys stole their fathers' girlie magazines to get a glimpse of Bettie. She was in the first "dirty" magazine I bought at a newsstand on a dare from my friends. I made the clerk put it in a bag. That magazine stayed in my dresser drawer -- most of the time -- until I left home after high school. Nowadays young women try to look like skinny, flat-butted 13-year-old boys. And they shave their pubic hair until they are as slick and smooth as a little girl. Bettie wasn't like that. Bettie was a woman. Bettie had curves. Bettie had pubic hair too, but not many boys I knew had those photographs. She is the most enthusiastically naked woman many of us will ever see. But even in those pictures there is an undeniable innocence that cloaks Bettie. Bettie is dead, but she will always be wonderful to look at. And remember.

The word “pudendum” is followed by the word “pudgy” in Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10th Edition. The next listing should be “Britney Spears.” Because Britney apparently has a pudgy pudendum to ponder.

At least that seems to be what huge numbers of people are searching for all over the Internet. The photographs show Britney climbing out of the back seat of a limo. In one of them, Paris Hilton sits to her left, her arm extended, her hand on Britney’s thigh. Britney is wearing a short skirt and, as subsequent photos show, no underwear. Now people are looking for “it” on the Internet the way boys once lurked beneath the school stairs trying to get a glimpse of “it.” Sure, Britney is a celebrity, and maybe all those Internet searchers think she has an “IT!” but the truth is Britney’s is not an “IT!” It is just another “it”. Britney’s “it” is pudgy and bald and not much to look at. But millions of people have typed in millions of keystrokes launching millions of searches looking for it. Sometimes they get lucky.

The question is: Why do they want to?

An extraordinarily large number of women seem willing to fling their “it” out there into cyberspace for anyone to see. Naked women and naked men are doing and being done all over the Internet. And people are watching. Any child who hasn’t seen “it” and a whole lot more had better take Remedial Computers 101. Men are accused of looking at "it" too much. Wives and protestant preachers complain of men’s “pornography addictions”. But maybe the poor guys are simply confused. The urge to pray and the urge to do or be done seem to originate from somewhere around the same place; sex and salvation share a descriptive language, and it seems an orgasm and a religious experience might be easily confused the way people talk about them. Sex feels good, watching sex feels good, God feels good.

Dirty pictures. People are simply looking for good old dirty pictures. And that is a good thing. In an Internet world where there seems to be no shame, perhaps there is hope in the search for Britney’s “it.” There is something almost sweetly old-fashioned and prudish about it, a longing for times when seeing something like Britney’s naked “it” really meant something. Perhaps the longing is lodged somewhere in the roots of “pudendum” – the word, not the item. It goes back to the Latin word pudere, which means “to be ashamed or to make ashamed.” The word that preceeds “pudendum” in the dictionary is “pudency;” it is defined as "modesty." All those fingers, all those keystrokes, all those searches, all of those people furtively seeking the immodestly shameful. There is a glimmer of hope, but not in Britney’s pudgy “it.” Naked is naked and it is on the market everywhere; but even in a world with only a little pudency, sneaking a free peek at a pudgy private pudendum is priceless. It is a dirty picture.

I can hear my mother now. "That hair." That is what she would say first. Then: “Trashy is as trashy does,” she would say, her mouth turning down in the corners the way Southern women’s do because they live their lives with a bad taste in their mouths from something or other just about all the time (and Debbie Lafave is one mouthful of bad taste). And Debbie did it; there is no doubt about that. She was a 23-year-old teacher and she had sex with a 14-year-old boy (she was a reading teacher and he was her student) three times in four days, and there was lots of oral sex other times, according to what the boy told his Mama (and I bet she sounded just like my mother when she said, “Trashy is as trashy does” or some such).

But when it came down to it, that same disgusted Mama wouldn’t let her boy testify in open court, so the prosecutors in Marion County, Fla., had to drop the charges. Debbie had plea-bargained herself down to three years of house arrest and seven years on probation in Hillsborough County (where they allegedly had sex in the back seat of an SUV while the boy’s cousin drove them around). But the Marion County, Fla., (they had sex there too) judge would not accept that plea deal , threw it out and declared he would not accept any sentence that did not have prison time in it (he said such a deal “shocks the conscience of this court). But when the star witness wasn’t allowed to testify by his Mama, the case, the plea bargain and everything else went out the window. Debbie Lafave was declared free to go back to her three years of house arrest and be done with it (besides, she has a fiancé whose love she says is “unconditional,” which apparently means he is not afraid to go where a 14-year-old has been before and doesn't mind being married to a registered sex offender).

It sounded like it all worked out to me: Debbie gets hers (three years of house arrest), the boy gets his (and bragging rights besides), Debbie's fiance gets the leftovers, and the crackpot judge who had to have prison time as part of the sentence gets nothing. Though I think this case would have been a tough sell to a jury, especially one with men on it who had once been 14 years old themselves (and I’ll bet I am not the only one who would have a hard time ever seeing a 14-year-old boy as the victim here, after figuring the boy's hormones and her cute little self into it). I wasn’t even going to think about Debbie Lafave or write about her any more, but then she had to go and pull bipolarism and God into it. Now, that was a trashy thing to do. (And besides, my friend Lori sent me an email about the whole mess and I had to do something.)

After the charges against her were dropped, Debbie said she is being treated for bipolarism. She said it like it actually meant something meaningful, but I know a thing or two about bipolarism and don’t recall the uncontrollable urge to fuck 14-year-olds being part of it. In this case, I think bipolarism means never having to say you’re sorry (not really, really sorry), just the way lots of women Debbie’s age mean it (they learned it from daytime television). This was just Debbie’s Oprah-esque way of saying: “Look at cute little me. I am a victim too.” I say bullshit and I just hope they don’t let her watch too much Oprah and gyno-channel cable TV while she’s locked up in her house for those three years.

And then Debbie had to go and say, “I am a strong Christian woman. I believe that God has a path for me, and this was just a bump in the road.” There are lots of ways to describe what Debbie did with Mr. 14-Year-Old (Debbie called him the “young man” in court), but “bump in the road” on the pathway of life is not a very convincing way to put it. (Mae West would not have said anything about a bump in the road. She would have said something like, "I wrote the story myself. It's about a girl who lost her reputation and never missed it.” But then Mae was clever, and Debbie just seems blonde.)

And what bumpy path does God have for little Debbie? “God has given me a great outlet to write, and I would hope I could reach people through writing.” Writing! Come on! (But I guess when I study it a bit, I can see that only a born writer with a God-given way with words could so richly yet succinctly describe a 25-year-old woman having sex with a 14-year-old boy as a “bump in the road.” Doesn't that just about say it all? Well, maybe not all, but I know I can hardly wait to read the book.) Debbie says she is going to take some journalism courses to hone her talent (probably those mail order or Internet courses other prisoners take because they have so much time on their hands. Don’t you sometimes wonder if the ones on death row ever end up smart enough to understand they could have accomplished the same thing by paying attention in high school and it would have been called “graduation” not “execution” when they left?). Anyway, maybe Debbie will at least learn something about originality and metaphors. We can only hope. Because I am afraid Debbie honestly believes somebody will buy this bipolars-for-Jesus, using-my-Bible-for-a-roadmap stuff.

The journalism courses might help some, but it is far more likely that we will see Debbie Lafave, the Good Christian Bipolar Naked Woman, on the slick pages of Playboy or Hustler long before we ever see Debbie Lafave, the author, on anybody’s bestseller list. Debbie is a woman who obviously likes for her gratification to be instant. Writing takes time; getting naked doesn’t. Come to think of it, 14-year-old boys probably don’t either. Maybe she can call her first book The Quickie.

(And maybe she can begin by using her so-called God-given writing talent to explain what in the hell "God has given me a great outlet to write" actually means.)

“Adultery” is one of those words that has a feeling of sexy fun built right into it (it’s a Ten Commandments thing), but “stupidity” isn’t. Lisa Lynette Clark could have picked a married man and had fun with Commandment 7, but she didn’t. She picked a boy (picking a boy does not even rate a Commandment). Not only that, but she ended up pregnant and married the kid. And now she is going to jail. She pleaded guilty to statutory rape March 15.

Lisa Lynette Clark, 37, is a marked woman. Hester Prynne was marked with an embroidered “A” for adultery in The Scarlet Letter. Lisa Lynette’s mark is the letter “S,” for dumb. Lisa Lynette doesn’t need to embroider anything as fancy as Hester’s “A” while she is spending the next few months in jail. She can just pick herself up one of those “I’m With Stupid” sweatshirts over at the Wal-Mart in Gainesville, Ga., on the way out of town after they turn her loose. She can buy a matching one for her husband, Mr. Jailbait, but she’d better not try to give it to him unless it is for his 17th birthday.

Lisa Lynette admitted she statutorily raped her 15-year-old husband before she got pregnant and married him (a perfectly legal marriage under Georgia law). In exchange for her admitting that, the district attorney dropped charges that she: 1) enticed the boy, or 2) molested him (I have always figured this for a relationship long on enticement and short on molestation). Lisa Lynette got nine months in jail and will be on probation until the year 2010. That is as long as she abides by the conditions placed on her sentence. And it took nearly half an hour for the conditions to be read in court.

She can’t have contact with any children other than her own – and that includes Mr. Jailbait. Especially Mr. Jailbait (I guess Mr. Jailbait will have to buy his own stupid sweatshirt). Lisa Lynette can have no contact – even through a third party – with Mr. Jailbait until he is 17 years old, even though he is her lawfully wedded husband and the father of her baby boy. If he wants to see little Jailbait Jr. and give the boy a fatherly hug or chuck him under the chin or something, he has to arrange it with the Georgia Division of Family and Children’s Services. In addition, the poor girl has been banished from Hays and Dawson counties in Georgia(which I figure is not really much of a punishment, having spent some time in that part of Georgia). Lisa Lynette has to seek counseling and register as a sex offender (though I would bet Mr. Jailbait doesn’t feel sexually offended. MILF dreams usually don’t come true for him or anybody else).

Grandma Jailbait, the boy’s granny and guardian, isn’t happy with the sentence. The way she sees it, Lisa Lynette has gone from being a “pedophile” to being a “stalker.” (“She stalked this child from day one,” is how Grandma Jailbait put it) and nine months is just not fair. She also claims Mr. Jailbait is in dire need of more therapy and wants to get a divorce. She didn’t mention the DNA paternity test she was crowing about a couple of weeks ago. Lisa Lynette’s lawyer says granny doesn’t know what she is talking about. Dan Sammons calls the marriage “unconventional” (not to put too fine a point on it) but says the boy wants to stay married. “He loves Lisa Clark and wishes to have a life together and raise their child,” the lawyer told the Associated Press, adding that, “Punishment takes many forms…” and going on about how Lisa Lynette’s “conduct has spread across the face of the globe to be condemned.” (I know lawyers are supposed to be really good with words, but this guy makes Lisa Lynette sound like a bad case of acne. First there was bird flu to worry about, and now there’s Lisa Lynette’s conduct spreading across the face of the globe).

Lisa Lynette still faces charges in Douglas County, Ga., for helping Mr. Jailbait run away from a youth detention center to someplace in Ohio. (For a more complete explanation of the stupidity of that episode, see “WHERE BABIES COME FROM” below.) So it’s not over yet.

(See also “GRANDMA JAILBAIT AND THE DNA,” “RED STATE GALS WON’T YOU COME OUT TONIGHT?” and “GRRRRRRRRRL POWER: RED STATE UPDATE”.)

Lisa Lynette Clark has love in her heart. She told a judge in Gainesville, Ga., that she was not guilty of statutorily raping, child molesting or minor enticing her 15-year-old husband (and the father of her child), Mr. Jailbait, even if she is 22 years older than he is. Then she turned around and (in what must have been a touching moment) had her lawyer ask if she could send Mr. Jailbait the tiny plastic “birth bracelet” that their Baby Jailbait wore in the hospital after he was born a couple of weeks ago (I told you the woman has love in her heart). But Lisa Lynette and Mr. Jailbait can’t have any contact with each other by court order, and the judge must have thought that bracelet had Lisa Lynette cooties on it or the boy would divine a message from it or let it lead him into naughty behavior or something. The judge said, “No.” And she said, “No” to reinstating Lisa Lynette’s bail too.

Lisa Lynette is not in the slammer for doing it with Mr. Jailbait; she was out on bail for that. She is in the slammer for helping Mr. Jailbait run off to Ashtabula Ohio, then sending him money and a cell phone (see “WHERE BABIES COME FROM” below). It was a dumb stunt and Mr. and Mrs. Jailbait ended up back in the slammer again, bail denied. Lisa Lynette never even made it to Ashtabula and Mr. Jailbait never got to use the cash or the cell phone either. In fact, it was an escape attempt so stupid that it might go a long way toward explaining why a 37-year-old woman would get herself knocked up by a 15-year-old boy, then marry him, then convince herself she really loves him and they can have a life together with little Jailbait Jr. Stupidity can be an awfully powerful thing, especially if it gets mixed up with love.

There is talk that a plea bargain is in the works, but Grandma Jailbait, the little hubby’s guardian, is having none of it. She even seems to be trying to queer the deal by running her mouth about it on TV. The deal would allow Lisa Lynette to go home for a couple of months to take care of newborn Jailbait Jr. After that, she would serve 10 months in jail. But Grandma Jailbait wants more than an year in jail; she wants them to throw the book at poor Lisa Lynette (I guess she must figure that Mr. Jailbait grew up without his mama – for some unexplained reason – and it didn’t seem to do him any harm, other than that time he spent in juvenile detention and on probation for whatever he did before he met Lisa Lynette). But the Hall County district attorney doesn’t seem to really have his heart in throwing the book at anybody. (Grandma Jailbait clearly has a hard-on for Lisa Lynette; maybe Granny should just understand the whole thing for what it is: something that runs in the family.)

Grandma Jailbait says her “insides have not been right” (I actually grew up around women who said thing like this) since the district attorney called her the other night to explain the deal. She called it “outrageous.” And to top it off she is having a DNA test done to see if Mr. Jailbait really is that baby’s daddy. She is expecting the results in a few days and (in what must have been another touching moment), Grandma Jailbait said Mr Jailbait asked if there is “DNA proof that it’s mine, would you bring it up here?” I assume the "it" in question is Jailbait Jr., not the test results. (Somebody needs to tell Mr. Jailbait that little Jailbait Jr. is a boy, not an it.) Grandma Jailbait said she “certainly” would do just that. She also says Mr. Jailbait is talking about divorcing the mother of Little It. Ain’t love grand?

Lisa Lynette’s lawyer doesn't seem to think he will have to use the stupidity-and-Ashtabula defense and says his client is protected from the wrath of Grandma Jailbait or anybody else because she married the boy and he married her. He says the same law that allowed Lisa Lynette to marry Mr. Jailbait “emancipated” the boy and made him an adult, “Under the law.” Maybe that is the stupidity defense.

I figure the boy is probably just about as adult as everyone else involved in this mess.

MEANWHILE: In Laurens, S.C., (the state next door to Georgia, where Lisa Lynette lives and loves, if you are keeping score), fifth-grade teacher Wendie Schweikert, 36, has been charged with two counts of sexual contact with a minor after being accused of having sex with an 11-year-old student at the school. Police say she has confessed to having sex with the boy twice on top of her classroom desk. She had worked for the school district for nine years and was described as “a good employee” who had never been in trouble. She remains in jail on a $100,000 bond. I think we should let more advertisers, movies and television sexualize children, don’t you?

Lisa Lynette Clark and her 15-year-old hubby – let’s just call him “Mr. Jailbait,” even though he is a legally married boy (I can’t wait to see those Georgia courts sort this one out) – are parents. It’s a boy!! She is 37 years old and claims that if Mr. Jailbait had not lied to her and told her he was 17 years old none of this would have happened (everybody who believes that wins a free ticket to see “Deliverance” when it comes to that drive-in theater out by the kudzu patch), but the boy lied (or maybe she felt like Scarlett O’Hara and didn’t really give a damn that he was 14 at the time) and it happened.

The baby was due Feb. 20, but she headed for the hospital Feb. 11 and the birth apparently went smoothly because by Feb. 13 Lisa Lynette was back in jail. Little Jailbait Jr. weighed 7 pounds 9 ounces. Mr. Jailbait, who is being held in the detention center in Hall County, apparently has not seen his firstborn (at least we think it is his firstborn). It would be nice to think he sent his wife a valentine (things like that mean so much to older women), but he probably didn’t because Lisa Lynette and Mr. Jailbait are not supposed to have any contact with each other. In fact, they are not supposed to come within 100 yards of each other. Which is why Lisa Lynette was back in the slammer before the birth of Jailbait Jr. Now she has been charged with hindering the apprehension of a juvenile in addition to the child molestation charges she was already facing.

What happened is that Mr. Jailbait hightailed it out of the Douglas County, Ga., group home where he was being held on a parole violation a couple of weeks ago. The parole violation had nothing to do with Lisa Lynette, but lots of people thought she had a lot to do with the boy’s big vamoose. Nobody knows how Mr. Jailbait got to the bus station (but people are willing to venture a guess) and ended up riding a Greyhound to Ashtabula, Ohio, where he showed up at the home of some “friends” (who claimed they didn’t know he was in any trouble or a runaway, but don’t seem to have found it strange that a 15-year-old kid would ride a bus to northern Ohio from Georgia and show up on their doorstep).

Ashtabula, Ohio? Damn. If Lisa Lynette loves Mr. Jailbait as much as she claims to (she still claims she wants to have a happy and love-filled home with Mr. Jailbait and little Jailbait Jr.), why in the hell would she send him to Ashtabula,Ohio? (this tale certainly isn’t fraught with the poetic possibilities of Romeo and Juliet). Ashtabula is way up there on Lake Erie, a little east of Cleveland and a little west of Erie, Pa., a rustbelt sort of place. Just the sort of place where a north Georgia boy would blend right in (have you ever met one of those goobers?). Ashtabula? Good thinking, Lisa Lynette. (I’m hearing a country song. George Jones is singing it. “Just a redneck boy/hiding in a rustbelt town,” something like that.)

Then there was the package that Lisa Lynette supposedly sent to Mr. Jailbait. Police say she sent it right to the address in Ashtabula where Mr. Jailbait was hiding out. They simply followed along. Then a cop posing as a delivery man delivered the package to Mr. Jailbait to make sure he was really there and, a short time later, members of the U.S. Marshal Service’s Violent Fugitives Task Force arrested him. The package contained a cell phone and lots of cash, no doubt now in an evidence room somewhere in Georgia or Ohio. Just like that, Mr. Jailbait was back in Georgia, only this time he was in the detention center in Hall County locked up tight. Even though Lisa Lynette is being held somewhere in the same facility, Mr. Jailbait still wasn’t allowed to see where babies come from.

So here it is: Lisa Lynette started fucking a 14-year-old (who told her he was 17 years old) when she was 37 years old. She got knocked up. They got married (it’s OK under Georgia law for a minor to marry without parental consent if the bride is pregnant). That was in November 2005. Lisa Lynette was arrested for molesting the boy (even though the marriage was legal under Georgia law), jailed and released on bail pending the anticipated Feb. 20 arrival of Jailbait Jr., while Mr. Jailbait went to the group home. Lisa Lynette got to tell her story on “The Tyra Banks Show.” She told it to Bill O’Reilly too. Mr. Jailbait’s grandma went on television spouting the word “pedophile” almost like she knows what it means (it sounded like a word Grandma Jailbait had learned fairly recently and she kept saying it over and over, like a baby that has just learned to say “Daddy”). Anyway, Mr. Jailbait ran away and rode that bus all the way to

Ashtabula; Lisa Lynette allegedly helped. He was detained, she was jailed. They lost their cell phone. Last Friday, she headed to the hospital, sometime over the weekend had little Jailbait Jr. and by Monday was back in jail. Her arraignment on child molestation charges was delayed until Feb. 24.

The people at the jail say all is OK, and that the jail staff has had lots of experience with childbirth and its aftermath in recent years because women are one of the fastest growing parts of the inmate population.

NOTE: And now, a little closer to home, a 28-year-old high school chemistry teacher (a "gifted" and respected teacher, according to those who worked with her) in Dripping Springs, Texas, is suspected of starting up an intimate relationship with a student. The boy's mother got to snooping around his email and his cell phone records and when she found what the newspaper described as references to "sexual activity and declarations of love," she turned the teacher in. The teacher faces charges of having an improper relationship with a student and indecency with a minor. What are these women thinking? The boy's mother is no doubt trying to figure out what "pedophile" means (she might be surprised) and just how loud and how many times to say it when the TV cameras show up. Maybe she can contact Grandma Jailbait for advice.

A judge in Florida turned down Debra Lafave’s plea deal (three years of house arrest, probation, register as a sex offender, no profits from selling her story, etc.) because he wants to know for sure how traumatized that poor little boy was by being exposed to his teacher’s furry little funhouse (trial set in April and Debbie could do some hard time despite her lawyer’s argument that such a cute little thing might get chewed up and spit out in women’s prison. Well, maybe not spit out, but thoroughly masticated). Apparently the judge thinks sex in the backseat of an SUV and in that classroom with Debbie might have warped the boy and he wants a professional opinion. The boy’s mother says a trial would traumatize the lad, expose him to what she called a “media circus” and keep him from leading a normal life. She doesn’t seem to think diddling Debbie did as much damage as the judge might suppose, even if some psychologist said a trial could be “healing” for the lad (what 14-year-old boy would want to be healed of Debra Lafave?). Mom wants the judge to forget the whole thing and accept the plea deal. She said it herself: She wants her boy to have a normal life. Hell, she might even know a thing or two about sex in the backseat and how it didn’t hurt her any. As for sex in an empty classroom? How many boys fantasize about a thing like that? Molested? I don’t think so. Besides, Debbie only pleaded guilty to two counts of lewd and lascivious battery (Try to imagine that: Does it mean she pulled down her britches and somehow hit the boy with that thing or what? And if she did, how did she manage to do it?) and one count of lewd and lascivious exhibition (which sounds like something lots of guys pay good money to go and see -- even 14-year-olds like Debbie’s boy if they pick a dark enough night and a small enough county fair near a small enough town, like this one time outside of Reidsville, North Carolina, back in about 1960 or ‘61). Memorable? Yes. (And who even knew until that moment that girls had hair down there?) Traumatic? No.

And Lisa Lynette Clark? She’s pissed off. And probably wondering just how a 37-year-old woman got herself into such a position. It's like a high school nightmare. She’s knocked up and her 15-year-old husband is in a juvenile detention center. She said the boy told her in the beginning he was 17 years old and if she had known he was really only 14 years old nothing would have happened (is this tawdry tale way too Georgia, or what? You can almost hear the “Deliverance” theme song in the background). Now, that begs certain questions about just why a 37-year-old woman would be interested in a boy she thought was 17, but she says he pursued her in the first place, not the other way around. She says the boy is “obsessed” with women from the 1980s. She said in a national ABC TV interview: “He knows a lot about my time period. He's into the older music, the older movies.” She didn’t say whether that would be the Robert Palmer “I Didn’t Mean to Turn You On” 1980s, or the B-52s “Love Shack” 1980s, or the “Can’t Fight This Feeling” (REO Speedwagon), “Legs” (ZZ Top) or “Modern Love” (David Bowie) 1980s. Or maybe it was the country 1980s, maybe even K.T. Oslin singing “80s Ladies” that got that boy all worked up and obsessive: “Now we’re 80s ladies/And there ain’t been much these ladies ain’t tried.” Whatever it was, Lisa Lynette said they had a lot in common (probably oldies stations and TV reruns, and maybe Lisa Lynette was out to get something she never got back in the late 1980s in high school and he was just the right age; maybe it started out as nothing but a déjà vu screw). Anyway, Lisa Lynette says she has been punished enough and she is tired of it and that the possibility of getting 20 years in the slammer is a pretty stiff sentence for committing the crime of falling head over heels in love with some guy who “misrepresented” himself. She insists the boy wasn’t a victim and she is probably right. She says she was the victim and I am not sure anyone will buy that. But maybe she’s right about the 20 years. She says she is happy, he is happy but “they” don’t like happy people (Romeo and Juliet, Sammy Davis Jr. and Mai Britt, Woody Allen and Soon-Yi. It’s a tale as old and repetitive as the Georgia hills -- how "they" don't want anybody happy). Still, the way she figures it, she and her teen hubby won’t be spending Christmas together, but come February she is going to have that baby and he will be there and she said she doesn’t intend to get divorced, though it is pretty hard to figure out what woman would want a baby and a teen-ager on her hands at the same time. That could be punishment enough.

And poor Amanda White whose dreams never did come true? The members of her church are going to pray for her, but they are not going to let her volunteer to work with children any more (and even though the boy she picked for phone sex, etc., wasn’t a member of the Victory Baptist Church in Burnet, Texas, the preacher says they will pray for him, too, and for his healing). The boy is probably praying, too, but healing isn’t likely to be part of it. He is probably praying for somebody to call him up and breathe heavy and talk dirty and send him girly underwear and condoms and slippery stuff in the mail, because that is just the way boys are -- usually praying for their dreams to come true; and dreams and prayers are pretty near the same thing when you are 15 years old and thoughts of God and sex and girls’ underwear get your brain to dancing like one of those night-before-Christmas sugarplum visions. It is hard to molest a boy who is thinking like that, at least in some way that he wouldn’t enjoy it. As somebody named Charol Shakeshaft said in the New York Times a few days ago: “Male brains tend to develop the part that can make decisions about whether it is a wise thing to do later.” Just when it develops to that point is probably up for debate, but I don’t think there is a woman out there who wouldn’t say it’s true.

(As for that county fair up by Reidsville: It was in a tent; there was a plywood stage; the lights were feeble; there was a record player, but the girl didn’t bother to dance; her feet were dirty and her silver shoes were peeling; even with those weak lights I noticed that right away. She stood there naked; she could have been 17 or 27 or 37. We stood behind a rope and studied her. Who could simply look at something like that? There wasn’t much fun in it, but on the drive home we agreed we got our money’s worth.)

Sitting here the day after Thanksgiving, I know one thing I am thankful for: I never ran into anybody like Debbie Lafave or Lisa Lynette Clark or Amanda White when I was 14 or 15 or 16 years old. One’s a school teacher; one’s a youth minister’s wife; and Lisa Lynette was a boy’s best friend’s mother. Two of these women had sex with boys hardly old enough to shave; the other one was a Baptist and only got as far as talking dirty.

Lisa Lynette got pregnant and married her boy; she is 37, he is 15. The judge who married them said he thought she looked more like she was in her 20s when he performed the ceremony there in front of Lisa Lynette’s SUV in the driveway. It would seem that a woman approaching 40, who looked to be in her 20s would have been in a good position to get herself a man, maybe even somebody with a job, but she didn’t or wouldn’t or couldn’t. Maybe she had had it with men by then. She even sent the kid love notes and dirty pictures of herself -- and no teen-age boy throws out his dirty pictures. The boy lived with his grandmother and of course she found them. Granny said the boy already was in therapy and she had hoped to speak to his therapist before turning Lisa Lynette in, but one of those love notes (along with what were described as “lurid” – a wonderful old-timey, quaint-seeming, grandmotherly word, “lurid” – photographs) made her snap and she turned in the child-molesting, cradle-robbing, harlot, hussy, lurid and painted Jezebel of a whore. The note that pushed Granny over the edge said: “I love you so much. I’m yours forever.” She must have realized that “forever” just might mean different things to a grown woman and a growing boy and didn’t want her grandbaby caught up in the confusion. It took the authorities so long to act on the complaint that the boy and his best friend’s mom tied the knot and even had a wedding photo snapped by the judge. This all took place in north Georgia and seems to have been legal under state law, but Lisa Lynette was arrested anyway, for sexually molesting her husband because he was under age.

Debbie Lafave was the schoolteacher. She hooked up with a 14-year old boy at the middle school where she taught down in Florida. She was 25 last week when she pleaded guilty to two counts of lewd and lascivious behavior with a minor. The boy told police Debbie was lots more lewd and lascivious than that. Boys are prone to brag about such things, even when they are grown men, but he said he had sex with her three times in four days, at least once in a classroom at the middle school, and another time in the backseat of a car while his 15-year-old cousin drove them around. Debbie also performed oral sex on the boy several times, including one time at her house. The boy did not say what he was doing while Debbie was performing oral sex. Whether oral sex is even sex is a matter of debate involving both U.S. presidents and the pre-teens and teen-agers who live on your street; some say yes, some say no, but it seems clear which side of the debate the authorities come down on in Florida. Debbie got three years of house arrest, seven years of probation (a plea bargain kept her out of prison) and has to register as a sex offender. Debbie is blonde and some people might say she was cute as a button. Some guy sitting around having a few drinks with his friends at the bar after work might see her walk by and say, “I wouldn’t kick her out of bed,” and his friends would nod slyly and grin and they would all have another beer. Her husband said Debbie had mental problems, got a divorce anyway, then ran Debbie down on national TV, saying she should have done some hard time in prison just like a man caught in a similar situation.

It was probably Amanda White’s good Christian raising that kept her from hopping right in the sack with her chosen fella, but she apparently spent her spare time creating a fantasy world for a 15-year-old boy whose picture she claims to have seen once on a friend’s cell phone. Amanda is the wife of the youth minister at Victory Baptist Church in Burnet, Texas. Amanda is 27 years old and somebody’s mom. She created a 16-year-old persona she cleverly called “Mandy” by taking the “A” off and adding a “y” and set about writing her young chap lots of cards and letters, having phone sex with him and sending him gifts that included bras, underwear, condoms and personal lubricant (no lurid photographs were mentioned in the newspaper). He always picked up the letters and other stuff at the youth minister’s house (where “Mandy,” apparently a shy sort of girl, was using Amanda as a go-between) and he probably said, “Thank you” when Mrs. White handed them to him, as any well brought up (though clearly somewhat dense) Texas boy would say to the preacher’s wife. Mandy? Amanda? Who knew? He finally caught on and told his mom, but not before he had asked Mandy to go to the prom with him (she was a no-show). He told police he thought Mandy wanted to meet him for sex. But it would have been condomized safe sex, slippery with personal lubricant. Or at least that was probably the fantasy Mandy and her teen-ager shared. Mandy was always asking, but Amanda seems never to have put herself in position to receive. She is charged with felony solicitation of a minor.

When I try to think like a teen-age boy (something I finally gave up as I was approaching 40, like most American men do), I realize I probably wouldn’t have kicked any of them out of bed. As my friend Paul once said, most boys and men “don’t cull much” when it comes to that sort of thing. But when I was a teen-age boy, grown up women like Lisa Lynette and Debbie were out of a boy’s reach (unless that boy’s daddy was willing to pay for one). Amanda would have been more in the realm of possibilities. She created a lubricated fantasy world for her little fella -- and teen-age boys live in a hormonally charged world fraught with slippery fantasies. At least that is the world I grew up in.

Lots of my fantasies involved a real woman who, even when she had a whip in her hand, looked like a woman a boy could trust. Her name was Bettie. She looked sweet and she looked like a woman. She had curves like our mothers and high-heeled shoes (highest-heeled shoes) our mothers wouldn’t be caught dead in. Her hair was black and long, but she had short girlish bangs. I must have seen hundreds of pictures of her: Bettie in her underwear; Bettie in her bikini; Bettie in her bed; Bettie standing up straight or bending over; Bettie tied up or tied down; Bettie with her whip (and sometimes, for reasons I still cannot fathom, with her whip and her toy monkey). I never thought of the photographs as lurid, though I am sure my grandmother would have turned Bettie in. I even found a picture of Bettie in a magazine in the dresser drawer where my father kept his underwear and socks; I was home alone and snooping around. I still remember that picture in particular: Bettie from the back, bent at the waist, very high-heeled shoes, bare skin showing, lots of leg, the right breast glimpsed in profile, but all of the essentials covered up, looking back over her shoulder at me. I couldn’t imagine why my father would have such a thing, so I stole it and put it in my own dresser drawer. I didn’t understand why I wanted to look at such a thing either, but I didn’t put it back (strangely, my father never asked).

Bettie Page is an old woman now. But she really isn’t. She made the world a sexy place to live. She still does. I suppose my parents found Bettie in the bottom of my underwear drawer when I left home a few years later and I would love to have seen the looks on their faces when they did. We have never mentioned it to each other. It remains between us, something sexily unspoken, something as excitingly lurid and darkly mysterious as Bettie is, and as we imagine ourselves to be.

And isn’t that the problem with women like Debbie and Lisa Lynette and even with Amanda from the youth program down at the Baptist church? The teacher, our best friend’s mom, the youth minister’s wife. Nowadays there are real grownup women with itchy britches and antsy pants willing to grab a boy by his you know what and put it any number of you know wheres. Women like that chase the Betties out of our boys’ heads before they are ready for them to go. Women like that take the sexy out of the whole thing. So, what’s a boy left to do? Hook up with some girl from English class (that’s what they call it, hooking up) who is a high-kicker in the high school dance line and get a blow job (which is pretty much what I figure oral sex means to both our kids and our presidents)? It isn't really sexy, but it's what is left.

Debbie and Amanda and Lisa Lynette don't care. They are a little lonely, perhaps somewhat repressed and from Georgia, Florida, Texas. They are Red State gals with ants in their pants and an itch that needs scratching. They are the gals -– a good Republican word, “gals” -- helping elect presidents and save America while they pray for an intelligent design. They are women without mystery and they will always get up off their knees to vote.